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Main Authors: Jacobs, Luke, Alipour, Mohamad, Watts, Adam, Soltanaghai, Elahe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15508
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author Jacobs, Luke
Alipour, Mohamad
Watts, Adam
Soltanaghai, Elahe
author_facet Jacobs, Luke
Alipour, Mohamad
Watts, Adam
Soltanaghai, Elahe
contents Soil moisture sensing through biomass or vegetation canopy has challenged researchers, even those who use SAR sensors with penetration capabilities. This is mainly due to the imposed extra time and phase offsets on Radio Frequency (RF) signals as they travel through the canopy. These offsets depend on the vegetation canopy moisture and height, both of which are typically unknown in agricultural and forest fields. In this paper, we leverage the mobility of an unmanned aerial system (UAS) to collect spatially-diverse radar measurements, enabling the joint estimation of soil moisture, above-ground biomass moisture, and biomass height, all without assuming any calibration steps. We leverage the changes in time-of-flight (ToF) and angle-of-arrival (AoA) measurements of reflected radar signals as the UAS flies above a reflector buried under the soil. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm by simulating its performance under realistic measurement noises as well as conducting lab experiments with different types of above-ground biomass. Our simulation results conclude that our algorithm is capable of estimating volumetric soil moisture to less than 1% median absolute error (MAE), vegetation height to 11.1cm MAE, and vegetation relative permittivity to 0.32 MAE. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in practical scenarios for varying biomass moistures and heights.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_15508
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Joint Soil and Above-Ground Biomass Characterization Using Radars
Jacobs, Luke
Alipour, Mohamad
Watts, Adam
Soltanaghai, Elahe
Signal Processing
Soil moisture sensing through biomass or vegetation canopy has challenged researchers, even those who use SAR sensors with penetration capabilities. This is mainly due to the imposed extra time and phase offsets on Radio Frequency (RF) signals as they travel through the canopy. These offsets depend on the vegetation canopy moisture and height, both of which are typically unknown in agricultural and forest fields. In this paper, we leverage the mobility of an unmanned aerial system (UAS) to collect spatially-diverse radar measurements, enabling the joint estimation of soil moisture, above-ground biomass moisture, and biomass height, all without assuming any calibration steps. We leverage the changes in time-of-flight (ToF) and angle-of-arrival (AoA) measurements of reflected radar signals as the UAS flies above a reflector buried under the soil. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm by simulating its performance under realistic measurement noises as well as conducting lab experiments with different types of above-ground biomass. Our simulation results conclude that our algorithm is capable of estimating volumetric soil moisture to less than 1% median absolute error (MAE), vegetation height to 11.1cm MAE, and vegetation relative permittivity to 0.32 MAE. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in practical scenarios for varying biomass moistures and heights.
title Joint Soil and Above-Ground Biomass Characterization Using Radars
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15508